Pale Moon 25.3 is out

A new version of the popular web browser Pale Moon has been released. Pale Moon 25.3 is a feature and performance upgrade for the browser that fixes several security issues in addition to that.

The developers have removed several features in Pale Moon that are an integral part of Firefox but not used in Pale Moon. Probably the biggest feature that is removed in Pale Moon 25.3 is the Crash Reporter which is used by Mozilla to receive reports about browser crashes when enabled.

Firefox users who don't know if the Crash Reporter is enabled on their system can load about:preferences#advanced, switch to data choices and check on the page to find out about it.

According to the devs, removing the Crash Reporter code from Pale Moon improves the responsiveness and operation of Pale Moon.

The second Firefox feature that Pale Moon's developers removed completely from the browser is the Mozilla Plugin Finder Service. The reason given is that it is no longer used by Mozilla making it dead weight.

The feature was used by Mozilla to highlight plugins needed to run certain code on websites.

Code was improved in various areas of the browser to improve the overall performance of it. This includes improvements in regards to date, time and timer handling, improvements in the creation of DOM elements with plain text content, performance optimizations for arrays and strings in JavaScript, and optimizations in SVG, style gradients and CSS parsing, presentation shell and SCTP.

As far as other updates are concerned. the ANGLE library was updated to a current version and WebGL was overhauled.

If you are using Personas, lightweight themes, in Pale Moon, you will also benefit from improvements made in this area. Especially the display of interface elements on dark persona themes has been improved.

Pale Moon 25.3 is a security update as well. The release fixes several security issues and takes care of all RC4-based encryption cyphers by disabling them all by default.

You find the list of all changes in Pale Moon 25.3 on the official website. There you may also find links that lead to resources with additional information about some of the changes, fixes or improvements.

Downloads for all supported operating systems are provided on the official Pale moon website. Existing users can run the update check right in the browser with a click on the Pale Moon button and the selection of Help > About Pale Moon >Check for Updates to download and install the update this way.

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About Martin Brinkmann

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Comments

Debug features always tend to affect performance, which is why they should be disabled by default. And while everything on the Data Choices tab doesn’t relate to user debug, everything there does trace back to some kind of “debug-related” activity–so uncheck everything you’re not using. (Yes, I’ve found Crash Reporter useful in the past… and hopefully not so much in the future–but it’s good to have it when you need it. Certainly, Pale Moon users wouldn’t want/need to be reporting crashes to Mozilla though.)

Any PFS code not yet removed from Firefox by Mozilla will be, but it’s not unusual for code to remain in place after it’s been “disabled” in order to gauge the effect of its planned removal, in the “remote” chance it needs to be re-enabled. (It’s not like it actually weighs anything or affects performance.)

I’m not sure Palemoon should be recommended anymore. Their fork due to the new UI apparently also removed the ability to easily integrate changes in the browser infrastructure and also security related patches. They do backports of security related things, but reintegrating those while also optimizing the browser seems a waste of effort. The whole pissing match between MozillaZine users and Palemoon users also makes me somewhat skeptical of the community behind it. (Especially when it comes to editing extensions that do not function with Palemoon anymore due to them changing the browser identification.)

I will agree that when recommending Pale Moon to a specific individual some thought to their experience level with Firefox needs to be taken into consideration. Unless the person is familiar with Firefox I would hesitate to recommend it unless I installed and configured it for them and had the time to explain some of the functions. And… I’ve done just that quite a few times (Thank You Teamviewer). I think the majority of Pale Moon users are long time Firefox users and probably would consider themselves “power users.” For a FF novice to install, configure and get the browser working with add-ons would not be a simple task for a lot of people. The simplicity of Chrome is one of the major attractions for a lot of people. I can’t agree with your statement that integrating security updates (reintegrating backports?) makes optimizing the browser a waste of effort. How so? I know that on my desktop and laptop Pale Moon uses 10-15% less memory than FF and easily 40% on average less memory than Chrome. And this is with Pale Moon having either 21 or 23 add-ons enabled depending on if I am using Adblock Latitude (Pale Moon fork of ABP) or uBlock. My FF install has 17 add-ons and Chrome has 7. And yes.. I’ve been using uBlock for a few weeks now in Pale Moon. Even my network speed tests and latency are faster in Pale Moon than in Chrome. It’s only a small difference but a consistent difference. And for me Pale Moon renders graphics heavy websites consistently faster than Chrome Beta v42. It’s unfortunate that some developers aren’t updating their add-ons for Pale Moon but out of the 20+ add-ons that I use only ABP was a problem and “Moonchild & Assoc.” made a fork. Hell…I’m still using the Readability add-on from back in the FF v3 days. Don’t get me wrong, I actually like both FF and Chrome. But Pale Moon easily has Chrome beat in security/privacy configuration options, graphics and javascript configuration, network configuration, tab management and customization, bookmarks management, scrolling smoothness and configuration. Chrome does boot up faster but to an empty non-rendered page. And last but not least I have never felt that Moonchild was ever dragging his feet getting a security update released.

I just wanted to add that saying “Their fork due to the new UI apparently also removed the ability to easily integrate changes in the browser infrastructure and also security related patches.” is INACCURATE and MISLEADING. WTH? The most recent security vulnerabilities were either a non-issue or patched weeks before Firefox or Chrome. FREAK vulnerability Pale Moon was safe from. SSL 3.0 (Poodle vulnerabilty) Pale Moon released a patch weeks before Chrome and FF released theirs. Which security related problems are you referring to?

Actually, you don’t have to be a power user to use Pale Moon, we have a bunch of users that are just average users, you just have to be willing to read and learn at least a bit or maybe a few bytes than using Pale Moon is no problem. A bigger problem are people that expect things to be just like in Firefox but that is just 90% true, the other 10% can be a PITA if you are not willing to learn but if they want everything to be like in Firefox they should stay with Firefox.

Anyway, I can second your observation concerning memory usage and speed. I run a setup with about 60 extensions and Pale Moon is fast and runs solid as a rock. I am using it for more than half a year on Linux and Windows and I still can count the number of crashes with the fingers on my two hands, well, unless you count that one time where I ran into an issue but – and I hate to say it – it was me who borked it, so I won’t blame the browser. You can even run the browser for a couple of days without restart, memory usage increases a bit but that is pretty normal and depends on the websites visited. Most stable browsing experience I had in years and 24.3 gave it a noticeable boost in speed.

If people are looking for a (google) media player, gaming console or chat client than Pale Moon is certainly not the right choice but I don’t need all that stuff, I need a fast and solid cross platform browser.

Another thing I like: Pale Moon gets release, when a new release is done and not when it’s time and you can be pretty certain that the release is stable. But if there are things that need to be fixed quickly, they get fixed quickly.

Stopped trusting firefox so started looking at some substitutes, ended up at palemoon. Wasn’t the astralis interface stuff or anything else, it was the security, that was the sole reason I went looking, just kept finding things out about my firefox I didn’t agree with, options that were just wrong! and the more I found the more it annoyed me how deceitful it is saying firefox being primarily about security, privacy and all that, not true anymore.

So yes work on palemoon is still appreciated and worthwhile. Thankyou.

When Palemoon decided not to integrate Aurora, I ditched it for the official Fx build. Aurora isn’t all bad, I’ve learned to tolerate it. I doubt Palemoon has the resources to maintain a fork of Fx especially with all the new threats coming out.

I too gave gave Pale Moon more than a chance and do appreciate the developer for trying to keep up with the maintenance but went back to Firefox. Was tired of rearranging icons on start-up. Some of my favorite extensions didn’t work at all nor didn’t work the way that they were supposed to. I also had doubts about PM keeping up with security updates.

When it comes right down to it, I had Pale Moon almost looking like Firefox anyway. Been with Firefox for almost 10 years (even ran it for 3 years on Linux when Linux still had Mandrake) and have to say that I’ll probably stay with it until something better comes along. Chrome? No way! Ever! The same with Internet Explorer. No way.! Ever!

Dan & Jan … a match made in heaven. :) Isn’t it funny how when someone makes a mistake they almost always come up with an excuse similar to “I am not bothered enough to get the name right. Everyone knows what I mean anyway.” BS to that Dan. And Jan, I assume you don’t know that to be correct, there is no space between a question mark and the last letter of the preceding word. Am I right?

In regards to Australis what would have been a better move on Mozilla’s behalf would have been to make it completely optional as a theme as it was in the past (vaguely remember it being that way) and work on the core of the browser rather than play around with design concepts whilst pushing away its user base.

I had been using the browser since Phoenix days and always enjoyed it but in recent years I have moved completely to Cyberfox and whilst it is not perfect within itself it does resonate better with me than firefox, for one it at least delivers a x64 build something which is still (as I understand it) to be available through the official channel which I feel is disgraceful.

I have not used Waterfox but have used Palemoon, in fact I keep it installed as a simple browser when I want to do a quick search for something on the internet or not load up a full browser session.

Overall I think Mozilla have splintered its user base. I do understand Mozilla has long term plans but they need to get back on task and stop trying to compete with Chrome or any other browser, they need to look within.

The only reason why you would Palemoon is attractive right now is b/c it doesn’t use Australis. You are at the whims of what the Palemoon developer believe is worthwhile to include. Media Source Extensions which is what is need to play 60fps youtube video will not be integrated into Palemoon ever and IndexDB which is used for Mega.co.nz for downloads is not included.

The addon compatibility issue isn’t getting worse too.

Also I am pretty sure Palemoon is not faster than Firefox. Palemoon is based on Firefox 24 ESR at its core. There have been literally tens of thousands of commits to Firefox since then continually optimizing the browser. The Palemoon staff no closer than a thousand since then, selective backports of security patches and whatever they think is important.

I can see how having Media Source Extensions would be useful to have but for my use I could care less and webRTC is something else I don’t want or need. I have two dozen YouTube subscriptions and have never run into where I would ever need to play a video at 60fps. If I want to watch an MMA fight or a Formula 1 race that uses 60fps I’ll download the file and play it in a proper video player or throw it on a big screen. Just saying. ;) In some kind of drastic emergency where it was needed because it was a life or death situation I’ll just fire up Chrome. Seriously, who doesn’t have two or more browsers installed? I have four. There is no one browser that does everything better than all the others. Also, MSE breaks the YouTube High Definition add-on that sets size, resolution and volume and also sets the resolution for embedded YouTube videos. The Horror, Horror I Say! And Not having MSE means that I don’t have to see auto-playing embedded HTML5 video, as much as I don’t like yahoo they are a good example of getting carried away with auto-playing video. As far as performance you can check it for yourself, very easy, very simple. Use the web developer tools built into all browsers. Tools/Web Developer/Network for FF and PM. Chrome is Settings/More tools/Developer tools/Network tab. Reload the page using F5 or CTRL+F5 which forces a cache refresh. Page load times will be displayed in the lower right in PM and FF, lower left in Chrome. Nowadays all of the browsers are fast but some websites are faster in some browsers and some slower. Examples that I use are yahoo, androidpolice, feedly, theChive, Jalopnik. You can see for yourself which browser is faster on your hardware. I do admit to using quite a few modified about:config entries but I have FF and Pale Moon setup the same. I don’t see any kind of significant difference in performance (other than memory used) between PM and FF and the difference in page loading time will usually be a matter of milliseconds but it can generally be seen which is faster. But… we are talking milliseconds, usually.

There are people who do not want technology in the browser which leads to closed source addition crap like DRM – MSE will be the entry point for DRM – and the Palemoon developer has the right to exclude that from the browser.

I never heard that a project developer must do with their users want! Mozilla constantly works against their own user-base again and again, why is that not bad for example too?

Staying with 24 core frees the Palemoon developers to remove all the unwanted additions from later codebases and as it misses lots of additional features and functions from later code-base versions the amount of necessary bugfixes is reduced to an absolute minimum.

Palemoon is opposed to Firefox a win-win situation for users who do not want a Mozilla experience which gets filled more and more with bloat and crap while real useful things like customization and options are thrown out.

Using firefox and no, I am not using australis thanks to Classic theme restorator. I have about 60+ addon and still firefox runs fast for me. Tried palemoon and didn’t noticed any signifient diffrence from firefox. Sticking with firefox. ;)

I’ve been using Pale Moon for several years. Initially, I used the 64-bit build as a secondary browser and 32-bit Firefox as my primary browser because I felt I needed a couple of 32-bit-only plug-ins. When Firefox adopted the Australis UI, I switched to 32-bit Pale Moon as my primary browser. And a month or so later when I realized that I didn’t in fact need those 32-bit-only plugins, I switched to 64-bit Pale Moon as my primary browser with 32-bit Firefox as my secondary browser.

I’ve always run pretty much the same extensions in both Pale Moon and Firefox — a total of around 50. After the big post-Australis fork, I had to find only a couple of Pale-Moon-specific equivalents (Adblock Latitude instead of Adblock Plus, for one), and I had to remove two from Pale Moon (about.addons-memory and Hola Better Internet) because they triggered crashes.

The bottom line is that Pale Moon has always run faster and more stably for me than Firefox. The only crashes I can remember in the years I’ve used Pale Moon have been attributable to the two incompatible extensions mentioned above. I definitely can’t say that about Firefox, especially while I was temporarily trying out the Classic Theme Restorer extension (even with a profile rebuilt from scratch, as recommended). Unless Pale Moon develops a gaping security hole or stops supporting my most important extensions, I plan on sticking with it for the foreseeable future. It’s fast, it’s stable, and I can configure the interface almost exactly the way I like.

As for Google Chrome, I uninstalled it a few days ago. On my Core2/4GB/Win7 laptop, it was an intolerable resource hog (with only 3 extensions!). For that reason and for nagging concerns about data-mining and user-tracking, good riddance.

I stick with Palemoon for all the reasons others have written here that this is the reason why they are not using the browser:

1) Australis – I want a native UI with customization included and no additional layer on top of an existing UI like it is with Australis. This is utterly bad and Mozilla made that move only to appeal more to simple or Chrome users. Which obviously has not worked out that well if you look at their market share right now!

2) MSE – This leads to DRM inside the browser and i do not want to have an open source project polluted by closed source crap. The reason why i used Firefox was because they stood for an open Web and defended the user’s freedom. This is gone, Mozilla has betrayed the open source community in various possible ways now!

If Mozilla would have stayed true to their origins and values there would be no reason to switch to alternative browsers like Palemoon. But Mozilla has utterly lost track and walks a long road to hell! If they like it, fine, but i do not follow there!

Mozilla pushes out all what made it unique and all for the money and simple users – abandoning so called “power users” in the process. Their best moments are clearly the ones in the past. What is left of them today – i can’t and will not recommend anymore to anyone.

I don’t like australis either, however after a couple of month it has at least become bearable.

MSE is the precursor to DRM, however not having it means you will be wholly dependent on flash, a close sourced but notoriously buggy plugin. I personally don’t see any philosophical difference between Mozilla supporting DRM natively, versus all the work they go to support Flash.

You also need MSE to play youtube video in any resolution other than 360 or 720p, not including any 60 fps video.

Then there is matter of video sights gradually shifting to HTML 5, with no doubt probably going to use MSE and Dash.

I also strongly doubt Palemoon is faster than Firefox. Palemoon at its core is Firefox 24. The Palemoon people themselves stated that they are only capable of a few hundred commits in a couple of months. Meanwhile since Firefox 24, Mozilla has literally hundred of thousands of commits since then, continually optimizing the browser.

As with all the other political stuff, I disagree with most of them, but I learned to ignore it. That how I got by in a liberal California University, I had full blown communist/socialist for Professors and even some subtle(in their minds) racial supremacist in some ethnic studies class, so I take what they have to offer me and ignore the rest.

And you believe people who use Palemoon do not know that? People who use Palemoon accept that no MSE and 1080P HTML5 is coming to the browser – no need to use flash, 720P HTML5 video is possible without problems.

Who is needing 1080P uses simply a secondary browser or uses flash – Problem solved, no real negative point against Palemoon!

Faster… All what is necessary to be said is equal with my first point. People accept and are happy.

Another point – add-on usage – Again, applies to the points above!

Last point, who accepts neither point 1 and 2 and 3 – is leaving. Problem solved, this people are not the user-base which Palemoon is looking for.

Palemoon is simply an alternative browser for people who are wanting the full native experience which Firefox was offering until version 22-28 and are accepting work-arounds or willing to give up certain things because they find that native solution of much more value as what Mozilla Australis is offering today!

People who do use Palemoon just do not want a browser optimized for mobile usage (stripping away customization features which do not make sense at mobile devices) and where the developers looking for more “mainstream” simple and Chrome users for which the mentioned changes in Firefox Australis apply too!

If i remind you in a friendly way there are also open source browsers around which completely refuse to add video features to their base feature set because the devs do believe this does not fit to the browser because a browser is no mediaplayer?

I fear you do not understand the concept of alternative browsers! These are browsers which are designed for people with alternative tastes, which do not want to go the mainstream way for several reasons.

To deny the right of existence to alternative offerings is pure arrogance!

Let me take back my last words – rather unfair – i apologize for them.

Of course it is not arrogancy – but most people only think the mainstream way, which is the real problem why alternative offerings are seen as irrelevant or damaging to the original product.

And let me give you a recent prominent example… Opera – has done Mozilla style, dropping features for mainstream users and mobile optimizations. Why are people switching now to Vivaldi which offers many native customization features inside? Because a lot of people value even today a native experience much more than layers added with multiple add-ons (Firefox Australis and classic theme restorer).

Simplification may be for most users these days state of the art and the way to go, but because of this users with more experience and which demand more from their software are forced to repair their browsing experience with third party add-ons which when i compare it with a native solution do not work as flawless and which are not as integrated than build inside – so called hard-coded features!

I’ve been using FF since the day 3.0 was released and about 2-3 years ago installed PM because I wanted a backup browser that wasn’t IE. I have both FF and PM setup as similar to each other as is humanly possible. The same add-ons, the same mods to about:config, userchrome and usercontent files. PM has a few more add-ons installed than FF. I choose to use the ‘buggy’ flash plug-in because it gives me 100% control on video playback in every element that uses it on every webpage. I honestly can’t remember the last time it froze or crashed on me, it does happen but rarely and easily months have gone by without seeing any kind of weirdness caused by the plug-in. This last year I’ve seen more issues with video playback using HTML5 and rendering of images and gifs since I installed Chrome Beta (flash disabled) 6-9 months ago.

It seems like every time Martin posts an update about PM there are numerous comments stating that they “strongly doubt PM is faster than FF.” For one thing, again, there is a difference in memory used. Always. For the most part I see a difference in the 10-20% range but on average I see in the mid to upper teens. Not a big deal if you have plenty of memory or don’t open a 100 tabs but the difference is there. Page load times are for the most part very close between the two but when there is a difference usually PM is the faster one. On this webpage with ghacks whitelisted in uBlock the page load times (average of 4 reloads) are PM 3.82 seconds, FF 4.86 seconds and Chrome Beta v42 64bit 3.47 seconds. Page has started to be rendered way before it’s finished loading. I didn’t want to post the Chrome results but there it is. Results are from my 5 year old W7 x64 desktop, dual-core @ 2.7GHz with 6GB of ram using the performance setting in power options. Clean install of W7 on a WD Black hard drive this last summer. It’s time to move up to a new desktop with an i7 processor but I don’t want to leave W7 yet. ;)

Another thing – MSE/Dash video playback is a clear discrimination of the available HTML5 “video element specification” – with the goal to already forbid with MSE without DRM implementation the download of videos – Not only 1080p also 720p one’s – no matter if they are commercial ones (i agree that these should NOT be allowed for downloading) or from people which would not mind that their Youtube videos can be grabbed by the user and stored for offline watching purpose (game capture videos, Anime music videos, retro videos and more).

Which is just Google’s try to offer only “premium content” – watch but not touch – on Youtube. Even forbidding so called “free videos” for downloading – that shows clearly the ultimate dangerous side of DRM! I would not be surprised if Youtube/Google would try after the future banishment of flash also to get rid of that free open available Video Element HTML5 specification.

No, DRM and limiting crap like Dash/MSE should not at all being supported. And i am sure that many websites will NOT implement this limitation, because it is not only limiting access to commercial stuff but also limiting availability to free things.

Thanks, Martin. Wonder if this version has the same?? Not hard to check…Yes! But I had to restart the browser. Seems strange that the default would be ”off.” FWIW, I have been using Cyberfox more than Pale Moon lately. I almost ignore Waterfox.

From the website : “Integrated PDF reader. The code for this is still included for emergencies (i.e. when you need to read a PDF but don’t have access to a reader) but disabled by default – you are always recommended to use a separate, up-to-date document reader for PDF files (as an external program, not as a browser plugin) for your own security, and to have documents displayed in their fully intended format instead of a stripped-down display in an in-browser reader.”

Been using SeaMonkey browser with the SeaFox add on and it makes it look like Firefox 3.* and also the Classic Toolbar Buttons add on. Found this to be a much better alternative than PaleMoon and SeaMonkey’s code is up to date. Also found it to run much faster than PaleMoon as well.

Ever since the Pale Moon browser development path caused extension-incompatibilities, I have switched back to Firefox. Here’s why:

When I started using a gecko-based browser again some time ago, I did so by modding Pale Moon to handle like the old Opera 12, or at least as much as was possible with the help of extensions. These changes to existing features and additional functionality do have a negative effect on memory consumption and speed somewhat, but they allow me the use of a browser which my usage scenario fits perfectly. With the unannounced changes to Pale Moon’s latest major version, I stood before an updated browser with half of its extensions disabled due to an apparent incompatibility. A shot across the bow like that wasn’t acceptable to me.

In the end, I decided that the original Firefox was the lesser of all evils. Yes, I have never been a fan of the Australis interface at all and I avoided that for about half a year by staying with Pale Moon, but there has always been another way to go. The Classic Theme Restorer allowed me to unmake any interface changes where Australis changed something for the worse.

Having written my experiences down, I can totally understand some of the comments here of people who wouldn’t support or recommend Pale Moon any longer.

I’m not an evangelist either way, but Pale Moon x64 with around 50 extensions is still working great for me. I still prefer it to post-Australis Firefox (even with Classic Theme Restorer) and it’s still my default browser. That being said, I am maintaining a parallel Firefox x86 installation with the same (or equivalent) extensions and as close as I can get to the same UI customizations, just in case the day comes that Pale Moon no longer does it for me.

By the way, I haven’t used Firefox a great deal since Australis, so I’ll ask: is it my imagination, or has Firefox with Classic Theme Restorer become less buggy, a bit quicker, and generally less awful in the past few months? It still feels slower to me (with my config, on my computer) than Pale Moon does, but less markedly so.

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Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.